Giving a Whole New Meaning to "Double Cheeseburger"

According to Cnet, billionaire Peter Thiel is directing between $250,000 to $350,000 from his philanthropic foundation toward Missouri-based Modern Meadow to create the bio-printed meat.

The company hopes to use the same technologies developed to create medical-grade tissues to bring food to the world’s dinner tables (or barbecues).

“If you look at the resource intensity of everything that goes into a hamburger, it is an environmental train wreck,” says Modern Meadow co-founder Andras Forgacs.

Don’t get excited too fast — it will be a while before you can enjoy a 3D-printed steak on your dinner table. Modern Meadow wrote in its submission to the Department of Agriculture’s small business grant program that its short-term goal is to create a slab of meat that’s one inch long.

This seems like science fiction razzmatazz right now, but things change fast in this crazy, 21st century world that we’re living in. Ten years ago, I didn’t have a computer in my pocket that was always connected to the accumulated knowledge of all mankind, and yet here we are. We may be enjoying hamburgers without cows before the first term of the Paul Ryan presidency is over. (There are two wishes in the previous sentence.)